Stuart Broad came into this Ashes armed with 582 Test wickets, a burning desire to stick it to the Australians one last time, just enough bluster to disguise the fact that these days he bowls an 80mph bouncer, and a bandana. You mustn’t forget the bandana. It was a lockdown thing. Other people came out of those months with a breadmaker and a repertoire of sourdough-loaf recipes, a newfound appreciation for their children’s primary school teachers, or any one of a number of debilitating social complexes, but Broad emerged from them with the inspiration for his latest character, the last in his series of Bowie-esque reinventions as a performer.
The bandana was meant, Broad said, to stop him touching his face, but once he tried it on it became something else. You could see him workshopping the look on his Instagram feed: “Trying to check wrist position but all I can see is the headband,” he wrote under one slo-mo video of himself bowling in the nets, then, under another: “Think the headband might be here to stay.” In the conventional telling of Broad’s story, the turning point in the late years of his career was when he gave a furious TV interview after being dropped for a Test against West Indies at Southampton; really, that was just him killing off Ziggy on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon.
